


through which the traveller picks his way

by purrfectj



Series: resign yourself to the influence of the earth [3]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game), Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Genre: Dreaming, Gen, Metaphors, Some mentions of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 18:13:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6435028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purrfectj/pseuds/purrfectj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tess works and she dreams and she meets Dr. Harvey for the first time.</p><p>This is part 3 of a many-part series exploring Stardew Valley, its inhabitants, and its newest addition, a female farmer named Tess. It's written in present tense and is rooted in my love for the farm where I grew up and my lifelong love affair with Henry David Thoreau's Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	through which the traveller picks his way

Because it’s there and because she’s stubborn and because she can, she works. 

In the beginning, she has only the stamina for an hour or two, abandoning some chores half undone because farm work is absolutely nothing like the hour she spent every other day at the low-rent healthclub in the city, weights and treadmills and yoga and elliptical. Here it is chop and dig and lug and beat and hack and slash and crawl into the old-fashioned clawfoot bathtub, the water hot enough to scald if she can be bothered to heat it on the little two burner stove, cold enough to cause chills if she can’t. 

She supposes dying by drowning because she’s too tired to climb out of the tepid water is probably a bad way to go but, really, she doubts the nosy folks of Pelican Town would be surprised. It’s an uncharitable thought, an unworthy one since everyone she has met so far has been nothing but kind even when she can be, has been, shy and short and borderline rude. 

Tess allows herself the luxury of the petty as she drags out of the bath, leaving the water for the morning, wrinkling her nose to realize just how dirty and scummy she’s made it. “Dirt. Dirt, rocks, fallen logs.” She mutters the words like a mantra, over and over and over again, as she pulls on a t-shirt and some old cotton yoga pants she wears for sleeping because fuck if she has the energy for _yoga_ when she’s spent most of the day hacking ineffectually at a log blocking the path to the southernmost pond. 

She doesn’t _need_ access to the water, yet, but she _wants_ it and isn’t that what she’s doing out here? She planted fucking parsnips. She’s never eaten one or seen one in her life but she planted them and goddammit, she will have access to that water or die trying for the turnips if not for her own sense of self-worth. 

The laugh she huffs out as she falls back into the bed is both self-indulgent and self-deprecating. She’s never cursed as much in her life as she does on this godsforsaken farm in the ass-butt of nowhere, and the laughter has turned slightly hysterical before she can stop it, and it is with the edge of hysteria that she slips into dreams. 

Dreams, for Tess, are not restful. They are always, always in bright, brittle, brutal color, no pretty pastels or soothing watercolors or even just slightly moody black and white for Tess, oh, no, only dreams that will test and taunt her long after she blinks open bleary eyes to discover that a leak has started its inevitable slow drip drip drops onto her bedsheets. 

Water. The planet, the people, the farm, everything thrives on water. As necessary as sunlight and air, water is the heartbeat of life, the pulse and pound, and after she sets a saucepan under the leak, Tess sinks onto the edge of the bed and back into the dream, the dream of water, a narrow, babbling brook that she follows because that is what, who, she is, she needs somewhere to go and to be, a reference point from which to begin (or end). She follows the glare and glint of the sun reflecting back from the rush and run as it joins with another, and another, and still another until she is hovering above them like a bird and she can see it spread out beneath her, blood and guts and glory, thick arteries and spiderweb veins, the sludgy, disgusting, beating heart. 

A sensation of vertigo, the rip, pull, tear of the ground rushing up to meet her causes a pitch and roll in her stomach, end over end, until she splashes down like a comet, burning, burning, lungs full of water instead of air, gasping, thrashing, gulping. She is weightless, mobile, beautiful as she glides through the arterial spray and she thinks it says something frightening and true about herself that this dream of drowning that she has had so often is still happening here, where she has freedom and agency and liberty. 

Perhaps escape was not, is not, her only craving. 

Muscles ache and burn and knot, palms and heels blister and tear and harden, her skin warms to light, toasty gold as freckles march across her aristocratic nose and, curiously, spread over her clavicle. Her body becomes an alien landscape: the hip bones that begin to protrude, the posture that aches less to hold, the thighs that turn sleek, the biceps that are more than tiny bumps and are useful. She is both more and less herself, a thought for a philosopher and not for a farmer but one she has anyway. 

The first parsnip harvest she cuts herself, rip, pull, tear, deep enough to see the white flash of bone and watches with the eerie comfort of deja vu as her blood rushes under, over, through, and out of her skin, drip drip drop, and the Valley gulps it down, so thirsty. 

This is the day she meets Dr. Harvey, splattered in her own blood, blasphemes on her lips, and something like forgiveness in her whiskey brown eyes. She watches him as he bobbles the antiseptic, as he injects her twice with the numbing agent when the first refuses to take, as his long-fingered, slender, surgeon’s hands stitch her up, precise, perfect, straight, better than her higgledy-piggledy rows of parsnips. Muzzy and disoriented, she reaches up and brushes the flop of his wavy brown gold hair from his forehead. “Going to pass out,” she tells him cheerfully. “I hate needles.” 

And she does. 


End file.
